The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram Essay

“The Perils of Obedience” was written by Stanley Milgram in 1974. In the essay he describes his experiments on obedience to authority. I feel as though this is a great psychology essay and will be used in psychology 101 classes for generations to come. The essay describes how people are willing to do almost anything that they are told no matter how immoral the action is or how much pain it may cause.

This essay even though it was written in 1974 is still used today because of its historical importance. The experiment attempts to figure out why the Nazi’s followed Hitler. Even though what he told them to do was morally wrong and they did it anyway. If this essay can help figure out why Hitler was able to do what he was then able to do, then maybe psychologists can figure out how to prevent something like that from happening again.

“The Perils of Obedience” is about an experiment that was made to test the obedience of ordinary people. There are two people who come and perform in the lab, one is the subject or the teacher and the other is an actor or the learner. The teacher doesn’t know that the learner is an actor. They are there to see how far someone would go on causing someone pain just because they were told to do so the authority figure. The learner is given a list of word pairs and has to memorize them. Then he has to remember the second word of the pair when he hears the first word. If he is incorrect the “teacher” will shock him until he gets it rig...

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The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram Essay
- “The Perils of Obedience” was written by Stanley Milgram in 1974. In the essay he describes his experiments on obedience to authority. I feel as though this is a great psychology essay and will be used in psychology 101 classes for generations to come. The essay describes how people are willing to do almost anything that they are told no matter how immoral the action is or how much pain it may cause. This essay even though it was written in 1974 is still used today because of its historical importance.... [tags: Stanley Milgram The Perils of Obedience]

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- Machiavelli declares that whatever you do, be it just or evil, if you know your actions will bring favorable results then you are not responsible for the manner, corrupt or blameless, in which they were obtained. This reasoning defines a timeless question: do the ends really justify the means. R. J. Herrnstein, author of “Measuring Evil”, believes they do, “A small, temporary loss of a few peoples comfort and privacy seems a bearable price for a large reduction in ignorance” (88). But is it not harsh to allow few to be terrorized for the benefit of many.... [tags: Obedience]

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- The complexities of a human’s willingness to submit to another person’s will have intrigued mankind since the formation of societal groups. Only in recent history has there been any studies conducted which so completely capture the layman’s imagination as the obedience experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram. As one of the few psychological experiments to have such an attention grabbing significance, Milgram discovered a hidden trait of the human psyche that seemed to show a hidden psychotic in even the most demure person.... [tags: Psychology]

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Milgram's The Perils of Obedience Essay
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Essay on A Summary of "The Perils of Obedience"
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